Imagine the following:
A hundred thousand
years from now, when technology has progressed almost beyond what anyone today
could have imagined, an R&D engineer named Bob is fiddling with his
company's latest model of long-distance transporter. He serendipitously
discovers how to transport himself outside of space-time. After many years of
research, Bob has designed and built instruments that let him measure and
manipulate the non-space.
Using his futuristic
technology, Bob creates a universe - our universe, the same one that he came
from. Ignoring the paradox, Bob nurtures the universe. Existing outside of
space-time, Bob is eternal and unconstrained by time. His instruments allow him
to monitor everything about the universe, and he knows everything that
happened/is happening/will happen in the universe. He wants only the best for
the inhabitants of the universe, and he can use his technology to manipulate
the universe at will. Bob arranges things so that intelligent beings evolve, and
he gives them instructions for how to best live their lives. Unfortunately
these instructions are almost always clothed in mythology, but Bob decides not
to interfere too much, and lets the various intelligent species get on with
their lives.
Bob is eternal,
omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, created the universe and has given
revealed wisdom. Is Bob God?
If a human has all of
God's attributes is he God? Or does God have to be a mysterious, unknowable
Being in order for us to think of Him as God? Would you keep the mitzvos
if it was Bob who gave the Torah?
In the 1993 Aish HaTorah
Kiruv Primer, "The Eye of a Needle," R' Yitzchak Coopersmith (as part
of larger discussion about using proofs for Judaism) writes that for an
already-observant Jew, evidence for God's existence reduces His existence to a
logical theorem, trivializes Judaism, and deprives him of a much greater religious
experience. Why should that be?
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